Recently in one of my English classes, my professor mentioned that one year her entire class could not think of an insult that did not trace back to women. For instance, "mother fucker," implies disrespect to one's mother; "bastard" refers to a baby born out of wedlock and therefore the loose morals of the mother, and the list goes on.

Thanks to the wonderful internet, I learned a new word today: "himbo," which is a male version of a bimbo. Now there is a word that means an attractive man who uses his looks to his advantage, but is really unintelligent. Interestingly enough, I am not sure if I fully agree with the creation of this word. On the one hand, we now are on the cusp of an era where insulting words are equal between the sexes. That is to say, that there will be as many insulting words for men as there are for women. Feminists only wanted equality; this includes equality through language.

On the other hand, is it right to have such words to begin with? Should people be judged and insulted because nature did not grant them intelligence? Should people be judged because they openly worship the body of the opposite sex? Should people really be judged at all? Judgement prevents people from feeling comfortable being individuals and therefore, we now have a world full of clones.

However, at least western culture has a foundation of judgements. Thanks to organized religion, we have a set of laws and rules and those who don't abide by those rules are punished and judged. This is not necessarily a bad thing because without rules, everything would be chaos. Yet perhaps it would be best not to judge each other as harshly as people tend to do nowadays.

Oh, the ethics of language. Always changing, a wonderful thing to study. :)